By Lilach Bullock
The importance of using video to promote your business cannot be understated. With 82% of Twitter users consuming video content via the app, and close to half (45%) of individuals devouring over an hour of visual content on either Facebook or YouTube each and every week, the expectations of modern audiences is rather obvious: they crave video, and if you won’t give it to them, your competitor(s) almost certainly will.
Crafting quality video content for your social media channels, as well as for your blogs, product and landing pages, and email blasts, is a no-brainer. But getting it right is also an art form. Providing the content is visually stimulating and the audio clear; however, videos will certainly yield results, reliably increasing the length of time people spend on your page and giving you a better opportunity to convey your USP. If you elect to star in the video yourself or put one or more of your underlings front and centre, you’ll enhance the trust factor into the bargain. We like to know who we are buying from, after all.
Keen to learn how to get started with video marketing? In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to create high-performing marketing videos for your business.
Where can you best leverage videos?
Before we get into how you can actually craft impactful videos and tools that may help with this, it’s good to have an idea of where you’ll be posting your content once it’s ready. After all, while it’s easy to see why customers desire video, it requires some mental gymnastics to envision where best to deploy them.
The fact is, there are many areas of your business wherein you can make improvements with video content. Indeed, you probably already use videos as part of your staff training. However, for the purposes of this article we are going to focus on marketing—using videos to both widen your audience and engage more fruitfully with existing followers.
There are a few key areas which virtually every business could strengthen with the addition of video. These are:
On social media channels: Over 500 million Facebook users watch videos on the platform every day. That’s right: Every. Single. Day. If that lone stat doesn’t compel you to make videos a mainstay of your online marketing strategy, nothing will.
Keep social video short (no more than a minute), incorporate captions and on-screen text highlights, provide value without being “salesy,” and most importantly, don’t omit a call to action. It’s awesome getting people to watch till the end, but you’re probably not in the business of racking up views with no firm goal in mind. You’ll want to get the viewer off Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and, ideally, over to your website.
Using short, easy-to-digest videos on social is a great way to improve engagement, create a buzz, and win more followers. Needless to say, you should post a variety of video types (stories, explainers, office tours, product demos, etc.) to maintain your followers’ interest.